"You say that you are wronged. Many of you are wronged, and many besides yourselves know it. Almost all men who have heads and hearts know it—above all, the working clergy know it. They go into your houses; they see the shameful filth and darkness in which you are forced to live crowded together; they see your children growing up in ignorance and temptation, for want of fit education; they see intelligent and well-read men among you, shut out from a freeman's just right of voting; and they see, too, the noble patience and self-control with which you have as yet borne these evils. They see it, and God sees it."
And then he urges them "to turn back from the precipice of riot, which ends in the gulf of universal distrust, stagnation, starvation.... Workers of England, be wise, and then you must be free; for you will be fit to be free."
For four years, 1848-52, he wrote for three periodicals, Politics for the People, The Christian Socialist, and the Journal of Association.
Many friends and relations begged him to desist from fighting the battles of the people, as such sympathy "was likely to spoil his prospects in life." But he wrote his wife in reference to this matter, "I will not be a liar. I will speak in season and out of season. I will not shun to declare the whole counsel of God.... My path is clear, and I will follow in it. He who died for me, and who gave me you, shall I not trust Him through whatsoever new and strange paths He may lead me?"
He always felt "that the party-walls of rank and fashion and money were but a paper prison of our own making, which we might break through any moment by a single hearty and kindly feeling."
In the autumn of 1848, while writing "Yeast," a novel which was first published in Fraser's Magazine, doing the work at night, when his other duties were finished and the house was still, he broke down, and for months was unable to do more than walk along the seashore and gather shells, even conversation being too exhausting for him.
Friends came to show their sympathy and fondness for the great-hearted man—among them Mr. Froude, who met Charlotte, the sister of Mrs. Kingsley, and married her.
Returning to the work at Eversley, where a low fever had broken out among the people, and where it was almost impossible to obtain nurses, Kingsley cared for the sick, watching all night with a laborer's wife, the mother of a large family, that she might receive nourishment every half-hour, and soon broke down again, and was obliged to go to Devonshire.
On his return to Eversley, cholera had once more appeared in England, and early and late he carried on a crusade against dirt and bad drainage.
As his means were limited, he usually took two or more pupils to fit them for the ministry; and now began his "Alton Locke," the autobiography of a tailor and a poet, in the interest of workingmen. "God grant," he says in the preface, "that the workmen of the South of England may bestir themselves ere it be too late, and discover that the only defence against want is self-restraint." He urges that they "organize among themselves associations for buying and selling the necessaries of life, which may enable them to weather the dark season of high prices and stagnation, which is certain, sooner or later, to follow in the footsteps of war."